Downbelow Domino, Chapter Three
March 26th, 20083.
I’m lost. I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.
The voice kept ringing in Castle’s head, and what was disconcerting about it was that it sounded different now. It sounded more like Castle’s own inner voice, the way it would if he were just repeating someone’s phone number to himself so he wouldn’t forget it; not like the breathy, moany, almost Kate Bush-ish voice he’d first heard, clearly but distant as if from a nearby room, when he came downstairs to call Dr Williams about The Incident.
The day before, he’d decided just not to think about it. A stray cat could easily have gotten into the house before the security system was installed, or even have some way of getting around it — maybe there was a hole in that garden, right? Or something in the basement. Even a cat licking up his come was creepy, sure. But that could be what it was.
Or he could have imagined it.
But it’d been Sunday, and if he called Williams on a Sunday, it would turn into a Big Thing. He didn’t want a Big Thing, and especially didn’t want this to be a Big Thing. There was no doubt that Williams reported everything to Jonathan — and while there didn’t seem much else that the big man could do, with Castle already locked away, it still seemed a poor idea to let him know too much.
He’d cleaned up the spot even though it’d been cleaned already, and slept downstairs in the living room, with the television on ESPN Classics, showing ancient ballgames and superstar biographies. He’d woken up in the middle of the night to that voice, that soft breathy voice, and forced himself back to sleep again with half of one of the white pills.
In the morning, so that he didn’t call Williams first thing — or worse, before he got into the office — and seem desperate, he set up a grocery delivery, ordered some magazine subscriptions and cookbooks, and tinkered with his DVD rental queues. He highlighted Babe’s phonesex number so he wouldn’t go through the round-and-round again, and he collected a few more numbers from the links on her website.
At ten o’clock, he called Dr Williams and spent less than thirty seconds on hold after giving his name.
“Castle,” Dr Williams said, and Castle could picture him perfectly, leaning back in his chair, stroking his chin, the spitting image of that guy from The Straight Story. “How are you holding up in your new accommodations?”
“I’m still having trouble sleeping, Doc, but the pills seem to work. I just don’t like taking them all the time. Make me feel dopey in the morning.”
“Sure, sure. You’d get used to that in time if you had to. Or I can prescribe you a stimulant –”
“That’s all right, it’s fine for now.” Castle took a breath. “Thing is, though, I’m having some side effects, I think. My vision’s a little strange — things out of the corner of my eye, you know, movement and things? And maybe hearing things too.”
“Maybe?” Castle didn’t say anything, and eventually Dr Williams repeated himself.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just adjusting.” Just adjusting. That sounded funny. Just a just a just a justing.
“Listen, Castle. It’s perfectly normal to go through some trouble with something like this. Isolation is a difficult thing. Anything you might be experiencing, it’s the psychological, the emotional, equivalent to allergies and colds when the seasons change or you move to a different climate. It’s system shock. It’s your mind, instead of your body, fighting off foreign particles.”
“So I just sit it out?”
Williams huffed, and Castle realized he was smoking one of those black cigars he smoked so much, that Jonathan brought him back from Cuba and other places. “Of course not. These days no one has to sit anything out if they don’t want to. No, I’ll courier you some Halcion and Mellaril. Take one every morning or every night, whatever works best for you, with a glass of water. Might take about a week to start working, but take them every day and if you’re not happy with them, give me a call. All right?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Anything else?”
“No. No, we’re good.”
“All right. If you continue to feel jittery at all, you should take up a hobby. Painting or something. Write a screenplay. Something to give you an outlet. And Castle?”
“Yep.”
“It’s okay to call. Your uncle isn’t your enemy, and I’m not his pawn. He’s concerned for you — the fact that I work for him doesn’t compromise my treatment of you, or I would never agree to undertake it.”
“All right. Thanks.”
He clicked end, leaning back in his chair and focusing on his breathing. See, Castle? Everything’s fine. Everything’s cool. God’s in his heaven and everything’s five-by-five.
#
It took most of two weeks for the medication to start working, and he spent most of it sleeping. When he wasn’t asleep, he may as well have been, for all the daze he swam in. It was chickenshit. He knew that. He knew it damn well. But he did it anyway, the way he’d done as a kid, sleeping to make time go by faster, sleeping when the black moods hit him, using pillows like shields. This time he had medication to help him, though — square white pills, robin’s egg blue ones, and brown gelatin-shelled capsules of kava kava. Beef stew — he’d gotten beef stew down, made it Monday while waiting for the pills to arrive, with cubes of rump roast and pearl onions and olives and Rioja — and microwave burritos got him through the waking periods, chased by glasses of milk to settle his stomach and half-hearted masturbation on the phone with Babe, Angel, and Charity.
It seemed more and more certain that phonesex girls were no more likely to use their real names than strippers or actresses were.
The hours beneath the tent of pills were three rings of dreams.
When reporters asked — when family asked, for that matter, or lovers or friends — he always told them his earliest memory was of his father being killed. It’s what they wanted to hear. It wasn’t true, but sometimes he believed it anyway. He used to dream of it, maybe because of talking about it so much. It was what he was known for, the way the Mikey kid was known for Life cereal. No matter how much he grew up, when he saw himself reflected in other eyes, he saw that little boy with the bowl of cereal.
It was late into the primary campaign, and Jacob Finch was the frontrunner by a respectable but mortal margin over the lust-in-heart Carter. The family went with him on the campaign tour, of course: smiling Candidate, beautiful Wife, and adorable Son, they posed for a thousand photographs. Castle thought it was perfectly natural for strangers with cameras to ask him what his favorite movie was (Sleeping Beauty), his favorite treat (Reggie Bars), his favorite toys (Carlton, his stuffed polar bear). He made the cover story of Life magazine when he told their reporter that his favorite TV show was “Coca Cola” — because of the ad where Mean Joe Green gave his jersey to the little kid. They still sent a case of soda every birthday and Christmas, in thanks.
When Jacob Finch found out the circus was in Raleigh the same weekend the campaign brought him there, he insisted on taking his little boy. Castle had never been to the circus — it was only recently that he’d been able to stay awake through all of a movie. Because Jacob Finch was Jacob Finch, going to the circus resulted in more than just standing in line, sitting down, and watching: it meant a Secret Service complement, a behind the scenes tour, riding on the elephant in the lap of its rider (a pretty woman wearing little more than beads and nylon), meeting all the clowns and acrobats, and petting one of the lions after he promised to be good and not frighten it.
“Welcome to the circus, Sebastian,” his father had said, smiling. No one else called him Sebastian. “It’s like another world here.” They were surrounded by wild animals, daredevils, contortionists, magicians. “Like Halloween every day. Everyone wears a mask.” The elephant rider, with her elaborate Carnaval mask. The acrobats with their Lone Ranger type masks. The clowns in their makeup. “Everything is different.”
And then Jacob Finch died.
That isn’t how it happened, of course. Only in dreams. In real life, when the lights went down for the motorcycling daredevil to perform his feats of fear-defiance in the giant spherical cage, a retired schoolteacher named Earl Russell, from Savannah, Georgia, got the luckiest shot in the world when he shot Jacob Finch in the back of the head from the bleachers with a twenty-year old handgun he’d bought at a pawn shop. Everything from the angle to the state of the firearm said that he should have missed, and there was some speculation that Russell — clearly unhinged, although with no known history of mental instability nor criminal record — had been set up or maybe aiming for someone else altogether.
Either way, Candidate Finch was dead, splatters of blood glossy and dark in the dim light of the circus, his cotton candy melting like snow under raindrops.
In Castle’s dreams, everything shifted like tile square puzzles, a few notches at a time. Sometimes he saw his father’s face in the cotton candy, formed by droplets of blood sinking through pink fuzz. “Welcome to the circus, Sebastian,” he said, in a choked voice, like the candy was filling his mouth and throat, lining it with coppery, sudsy, fungal growth.
“Welcome to the circus,” he said, standing on top of the motorcyclist’s cage, a bloom of bone and gunshot marring half his face, and then he leaned forward, vomiting warm, sticky cotton candy like fire extinguisher foam. The overflowing water of the bathtub washed it away, turning pink for a photoflash of a moment before dumping its contents over the circus. “Everyone here wears a domino mask.”
#
Teddy hadn’t stood up for Castle when Jonathan came up with his brilliant idea. In Jonathan’s eyes, Teddy would never be a real Finch, only a hanger-on, a swimmer from a subsidiary gene pool. But Teddy tried anyway, and half-worshipped the Senator. Castle didn’t know whether to hate him for it or only pity him. They had never been close, but always been friendly — and Teddy had been there for him a few times in the past, surprising times.
“Hello,” Teddy said slowly on the other end.
“Hi Ted,” Castle said. “It’s Castle.”
Ted filled the pause by clacking his tongue against his front teeth, an old nervous habit Castle remembered him having for years. “Wow. Well, how’s it going, man?”
“No comment. But you know, I thought I’d see how you were, touch base. I’m trying to, you know, stay in the loop with you guys.”
“Sure, sure.” Ted clacked his tongue. “I mean, are you all right? I’d be so fucking bored. It’s gotta suck.”
“I’m locked in a house, Teddy. Of course it sucks. But it’s manageable, you know? If I spent every day thinking about how much it sucked …” Truth was, he didn’t think it had hit yet. When he dealt with having been there six months … or six years … that’s what prison must be like, right? Periodic waves of new surprise at still being there.
“Yeah, I guess so.” He sounded nervous. “So like, keeping busy and stuff?”
“I’m cooking a lot, learning that. Reading. Lots of movies. You know how there are always movies you’ve been meaning to watch but didn’t get around to? North by Northwest, the first Halloween, Boyz in the Hood, and like that? I’m watching those finally.”
“Hey, so there’s a bright side.”
“Ted.”
“Sorry, man.”
“What are you up to, anyway? Still figuring on film school in the summer?”
“Oh, hey, that’s right — I got into Columbia! I deferred, though. I got a, a sort of opportunity, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“This studio, this little studio, they sort of want me to … run it.”
“What, a movie studio? In Hollywood?”
“Yeah.”
That was actually a good thing. Anything else, and Castle would have to wonder what hand Jonathan had had in getting Teddy his in. But a Hollywood job would have come down the Lightman pipeline. “Not bad, Ted, not bad.” In another month, Teddy would probably decide he’d rather be a broker, or a diplomat, or a damn astronaut.
“So, Cas, man, can I do anything for you? I mean, can I send you anything or like that?”
“I can get whatever I need, for the most part. You could come hang out or something, come visit.” There was a long, long silence, and Castle wondered if Jonathan had said anything. He was allowed to have visitors, of course, but did Jonathan imply that maybe he didn’t deserve them? “Or actually, you know, you could do something for me.”
“Yeah?” Ted’s voice sounded brighter. “What’s that?”
“You still into paranormal shit? Poltergeists and like that?”
“Sure, sure. I mean, most of it is crap, but there’s something to it, right?”
“Right. Uh. Well, this house, it’s pretty old –”
Ted laughed a little. “You got crows in your attic or something, man? Bumps in the night?”
“Hey, fuck off. It just made me curious about stuff, that’s all. There’s –” Weird voices out of nowhere, and a feeling of not being alone, and hey, something licked up my come puddle. “– something about old houses when you have them to yourself.”
“True that. What, you want some books on it or something?”
“I figure, you’ve already sifted through which ones are crap.”
“That I have. I’ll send you a package. Tonight or tomorrow, I’ll get right on it.” And he would. Teddy was flighty as allfuck, but when he got a bug in his ass about something, he acted.
“Cool, man. Thanks.” He thought about asking about the family, and shook his head to himself. “Well, take care.”
“Sure. You too.”
Castle flipped the phone shut and slipped it into his back pocket out of habit, and realized he’d wandered his way to the landing by the third-floor staircase, had in fact sat down a few steps up it. He’d barely been up there since moving in: the servants’ bedroom hadn’t been aired out enough during Domino’s unoccupied time, and the storerooms only depressed him with their fullness of other lives, free antique lives.
But there was that telescope.
He put the empty bottle down and went upstairs to the loft, where the scope was still pointed towards the neighbors he wasn’t likely to ever meet. A quick glance told him that at least one of the bedrooms the scope showed was occupied, so what the hell, he pulled up a chair and took a look.
It was the daughter’s bedroom: she was about sixteen, Reynolds was right about that, maybe seventeen. Tall, leggy, brunette, and laying on her bed doing homework. Nothing especially titillating, her shorts were dangerously short, and her T-shirt had ridden up to show an expanse of back. But there was something about the watching itself — already, even though he wasn’t watching anything in particular, there was something exciting about seeing without being seen. There was a power that tasted like cool water when you’re thirsty.
He watched her for an hour as the sun started to sag, watched her flip through her book making notes — she must be in summer school or taking college prep classes — watched her bounce and wiggle idly on the bed to music he couldn’t hear, watched her push her hair out of her face in one of those gestures that was somehow sublimely private. He didn’t see anything that should have been arousing — but by the end of the hour, when his neck was starting to hurt from leaning over the telescope, his cock had risen to half-mast.
Only half-mast. Once again — maybe the pills, maybe the stress, maybe habit — he needed something more to really get him going, something more to get his attention and get him off. He flipped the phone back out and scrolled down the speed-dial before calling Charity, one of the girls he’d been meaning to spend more phone time with. In the jpegs she’d emailed him, she was a Clairol redhead with a toothy smile.
“So what’s tickling you today, David?” Charity asked when they’d gotten past the formalities.
“I’m looking through a telescope at a neighbor,” he said, figuring there was no reason not to be honest and cut to the chase.
“Oooh,” she said. “And are you hard?”
“Not really. Only a little.”
So they guided each other. That’s one of the things he liked about Charity: she didn’t see it as her job to tell him how to come, and neither did she act like a talking doll, ready to be posed however he liked. The appeal of that wore off quickly, he’d found, whether on the phone or in bed. Instead, they got each other off.
He’d never, you know, minded when a girl got off, but it hadn’t exactly been his key priority, either. Now, it was a way of knowing he had her attention, that she was genuine, and not just reciting her lines. She’d admitted freely enough, after he’d spent a few hundred dollars on her, that she faked rollicking cinematic orgasms more often than not, but after he kept insisting, and it became clear that he wasn’t going to hang up on her, she agreed not to fake them with him. She was quieter as a result, and that was okay too.
“So what’s she doing now?” she asked at one point, maybe an hour later. Neither of them had come: they’d both come close, and prolonged it instead, kept the conversation going.
He glanced down at the girl’s window, which he’d lost track of. “Getting ready for a shower, it looks like.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious!” The shower was running, with its curtain open, and she’d tossed a towel on the sink next to it. The bathroom connected to her bedroom, and both had windows he could see into easily with the telescope — the bedroom he could see pretty well without it, for that matter. “She’s taking her T-shirt off now. There we go …”
“Nice tits?”
“Very nice. Maybe a little small. Her shorts now — can’t see anything really, but her legs aren’t bad — and there she goes, into the shower.”
“Can you watch her?”
He shook his head at the phone. “Curtain’s opaque. I’ve just got steam.”
“I’ll say. You know she’s masturbating, right?”
He grinned and walked over to the window, watching the occasional movement of shadow. “She is, huh?”
“She wasn’t masturbating on the bed. Nobody called in the, what is it, two hours now that you’ve been watching her, and it’s evening — so she doesn’t have a boyfriend, or if she does, he’s deafmute, in which case she would have checked her email more than once. So she’s masturbating.”
“You’ve got a dirty mind, Char.”
“She’s doing it right now. The water’s trickling down her — they have a water-saver shower head, the way everyone does now, but unlike Mom’s, hers doesn’t have the massage attachment. So it just trickles, smooth, liquid, coating her, making her skin soft and warm and pink as she runs her hands over it — just bare at first, nothing but skin and hot water, and then shower gel that foams up, gets her nice and slick. And when her hands slip over her breasts, soaping them up — when she turns away from the water to get her back, and the cold air prickles her nipples — when her hands dip between her thighs, she realizes she’s wet there. And the water feels so good, something about the way it covers her, and the way it keeps beating at her even though it’s gentle.”
Castle leaned against the side of the windowseat, stroking his cock as he listened to her, focusing more on her words and the images she conjured up than the vague and half-concealed bathroom a story below and a few dozen yards away from him. “And what’s she thinking of, while she’s doing this?”
“She’s not,” Charity said. “She’s not fantasizing about anything. She’s not pretending to fuck anyone. You see what I mean? She’s just getting off: not the by the book, whether you need it or not, maintenance masturbation that you can do in math class if you really need to, no, screw that. She’s getting off. She’s turned on by the idea of being turned on — turned on by her capacity to be turned on. She’s excited by the fact of her sexual being. The only things she’s thinking about are her fingers on her clit, and the water — hitting her face, filling her mouth, rushing down between her tits. This is her time. This is her fuck.”
He made a nonconversational noise.
“Are you stroking it for me?” she asked.
“Christ yeah,” he said, and he could feel that edge of orgasm returning as if it’d been right around the corner, where he’d left it half an hour ago, maybe longer, when he’d eased down because he didn’t want to come. Told himself he wanted to keep talking. Told himself to be lonely. He’d slowed his wrist and eased his grip, not-thinking very hard about a tongue across the floor.
“Good,” she said, a raggedness in her voice, at the corners of her breath. “Good, hon. Do it.”
“She’s coming out of the shower,” he said, and his hand kept moving, his cock kept rubbing against the whorled interior of his half-closed fist. “The curtain moved aside –”
“Yeah,” she said. “Oh God, yeah –”
“– she’s grabbing the towel, drying herself off — God, her tits look so good right now, I can’t even tell you –”
“It’s the shower water — the heat — the scrubbing — the skin tightens right up, like a face-lift –”
“She’s rubbing the towel down her legs, up her ass, oh –”
“Yes –”
“She’s in the bedroom now. Towel around her hair. She’s in the bedroom, getting her clothes.”
“Can you see her, baby?”
“Oh yeah. Oh, I can see her. I’m not even using the telescope. I don’t want to, not right now, I don’t — I don’t want it between us. All that glass. That metal. All that light.”
“Are you close? Are you? I’m so close.”
“I am. I am. I’m so close.”
And suddenly he froze — didn’t stop moving, but froze, his spine a wet chill trickle, but his hand still moving up and down the length of his cock like a reflex. “She’s looking at me.”
“What?”
“She’s looking at me. She — I’m not using the telescope, I’m by the window — it’s a low window, I’m leaning against the side of it, but my –”
“Did you turn off the light?”
“No — it turns on automatically when you open the door to come up here, I didn’t — I didn’t think to turn it –”
“Oh God, she’s looking right at your cock. She can see your cock. Right there in the window, with the light behind it. Your cock.”
And he came, right then and there, looking the girl in the eyes from across the way and up the house. She didn’t show any sign of seeing him or not — just stood there, watching, the look on her face daydreamy, maybe hungry, or maybe he only wanted it to be. Maybe she was looking off into the middle distance. Maybe she was looking at her reflection in the window.
As he mumbled some kind of goodbye-and-thanks to Charity, he couldn’t take his eyes off the girl, who was singing along to something on the radio, or talking to herself or someone not in the room –
– someone not in the room, his inner voice insisted, someone very much not in the room –
– as she caressed the underside of her breast. She did it unselfconsciously, distractedly, the way she might move a strand of hair that had fallen over her eyes, but as she caressed it, even lightly, she lifted it — as if offering it to him. He wasn’t sure he could read her lips from this far — it wasn’t something he’d noted a particular knack for — but could have sworn — couldn’t be positive — could have sworn — that she was saying, “I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.”
Downstairs, there was a sudden wobbling rattle, as something knocked over the empty Moxie bottle Castle had left by the stairs.